Rural Income Distribution

The international lending agencies judged as poor the performance of the agricultural sector of Sierra Leone during the 1980s. Prior to assessing this judgement, one must consider the social and economic characteristics of the sector. By all accounts, agricultural production in Sierra Leone remained overwhelmingly for subsistence, with a low degree of monetization. The 1970/71 farm survey estimated that only for cocoa and coffee did a majority of the growers of a crop sell a surplus on the market. For the most common crop, rice (46 per cent of total area planted in the country in the early 1970s), only 31 per cent of farms produced a marketed surplus. For the agricultural year 1970–71 crop value added was Le 72 million (including imputed value of subsistence, but excluding tree crops). The survey estimated that marketed output of non-export crops was slightly less than 8 million (Central Statistics Office, 1972, p. 73). Coffee, cocoa, and palm kernels were about 10 million, yielding a figure for cash agriculture of 18 million. If one subtracts out the intermediate component of sales to keep to the value added concept, the degree of monetization of crop agriculture could have been no more than 20 per cent. In 1984 the World Bank guessed that ‘less than 40% of total production [entered] the monetized economy’ (World Bank, 1984, p. iv). Thus, it was generally agreed that the vast majority of farm families had little dealing with the money economy; i.e., their decisions were not to any great extent directly determined by market prices.